Mobile mattered more than ever this past holiday season.
Mobile commerce went from being a necessary evil to an overnight game-changer. The merchants that got on board with mobile commerce reaped the benefits of the iOS and Android-armed shoppers. In addition to mobile sales and traffic figures, this report details holiday ecommerce benchmark survey results: Read More

To provide perspective for retailers on consumer behavior in today’s fluid shopping culture, UPS commissioned this research with comScore for the third consecutive
year. The opportunity and the challenges are here in equal measure for today’s retailer. Consumers continue to gravitate to Internet channels as desktop retail e-commerce reached $211 billion in 2013, up +13% year/year. Mobile or m-commerce is growing and now accounts for 11% of retail e-commerce as of 1Q14. Read More

Shopping online can be a great experience. You don’t have to leave the comfort of your home and you can quickly compare and read about all the competing products in order to pick the best one for you. But it can also be a little frustrating if the process isn’t designed correctly.

Looking around for that checkout link, having to fill out registration forms and then being told the product is out of stock isn’t going to make your day. Spend a little bit of time fine tuning your checkout process and polishing off the user experience and you’ll be rewarded with happier customers and more sales. Here are 12 useful tips to help you do just that.

Sure, your web store looks just great and you have a right to be proud of it. But did you ever sit with a focus group to see what problems they had with it? Did you ever have top web site designers analyze it to find its hidden flaws? Have you listened to dozens of eTailers describe in detail how they vastly improved their online sales and conversion rates just by making basic design changes that eliminated the most common web site design faux pas?

Online retailing is expected to return to double-digit growth this year, and the web merchants that enhance their web site design and usability early in the year will lead the way. The growth will be achieved by avoiding the most common web site design and usability mistakes that cause shoppers to abandon the retail sites and result in an average conversion rate of just 3%.

Main reason for abandoning:
- Shipping Charges were too high
- Wanted to compare prices with another website
- Wanted to compare prices with a Bricks and Mortar store
- Wanted to look for an online coupon
- The preferred payment option was not available

Main Suggestion for Online Merchants
- Provide shipping charges upfront before the checkout
- Provide as many options for payment as possible

Shipping still seems to be the main driver for visitors to leave a website behind. We suggest that all online merchants carefully examine their shipping policies and consider making "Shipping" a marketing function rather than an "Operational" function.

The year 2010 should be used to optimize your existing eCommerce
Platform.
Many Online Shops I see out there have enormous potentials for
improvement. Some of them can't be implemented easily, e.g. Clean URLs
(URLs which just reveal their resource, but not their technology) - here
you are often limited by the technology and platform you use. However,
there are many things you can do in the field of technical Search Engine
Optimization (SEO). For this purpose one option would be to create a
whole new template to get started. You can overhaul the GUI (graphical
user interface) and optimize the template for all the search engines
like Google and Yahoo. What needs to be done for this can be listed
quickly:Read More

Once you have your website up and people have started visiting it,
your battle has only just begun. Everything is for sale in the
Internet from snake oil to – maybe – atomic power barbecues. Why
should people buy from you and how can you be sure you are making
money on the sales? Making money on sales seems easy – if you buy for
$8 and sell for $10, you have made a $2 profit. Right! Wrong.

It may
have cost you $3 to sell the product and you won’t know it till you
have lost a lot of money. So here are some things to keep in mind.

Know why people should buy from you. If you don’t, how will
they? You need to know your product or service inside out. Nothing is
ever perfect. Your product will have its weaknesses. Recognize them,
try to minimize them and work with what you have.

Believe in your product. It’s not enough knowing it’s good. You
have to believe it. This belief will come out in your approach to
sales and add value to the sales pitch. Would you buy a Rolls Royce
from a salesman who could recite why it is the best car in the world
if you felt he did not really believe what he was saying?

What is different about your product? What benefits does buying
from you provide to the customer as compared to other similar items or
suppliers? These are called USPs or Unique Selling Points and make
your product stand out in a crowd. Know these strength and capitalize
on them when selling.

This is the first Post for The eCommerce Blog from Sales and Marketing Automation.

Our mission with this blog is to promote eCommerce Best Practices to Small business owners. We will be including topics that relate to building eCommerce Sites, marketing eCommerce Sites and managing eCommerce Sites.

We are not sure where this journey will take us but the general direction we are going to set out on is to expose the tricks that make successful sites sell.

I will be the main contributor to the blog postings, and all of our contributors will some how be related to BigTurns Business Systems, an eCommerce Consulting Company with an eCommerce Platform for sale and a team of eCommerce Consultants.